The Law of Economy is very much visible in the present world that we live in. The Law of Attraction governs the impelling or compelling urge of the soul within us all, and the Law of Synthesis is that towards which the world and all of us within it are headed.
Robert: Hello, and welcome to “Inner Sight.” Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way with new eyes. So, stay with us and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our topic today is spiritual law – part 6. More specifically, we’re speaking about the Laws of Economy, Attraction and Synthesis—three spiritual laws. We’ll start our show with a quote from Alice Bailey, as we often do. Alice Bailey, by the way, is the founder of the Lucis Trust organization. It’s a worldwide organization and all of the dialogue in this show emanates from the books of Alice Bailey. She wrote twenty-four volumes of books around the early part of the twentieth century and everything that we speak about emanates from her works. And I quote: “When the three Laws of Economy, Attraction and Synthesis work with perfect adjustment to each other, then nature will perfectly display the correct adaptation of the material form to the indwelling spirit.” That has a lot of meaning to it and a lot of depth, and I’m sure that Sarah and Dale both are going to explore that, so, why are these three laws so significant?
Sarah: First of all, what are these three laws? I know they sound so obscure. I was listening to your introduction and thinking how are we going to make these laws sound vivid and real and most of all, meaningful to our audience? They’d have to start out by being meaningful to those of us who talk about them and there is an application of these apparently dry truths to the reality that we live in, and we’ll try to reveal that. We’ve talked in this series of programs about Spiritual Law and really, the idea of law being very closely connected with the spiritual path shouldn’t seem too strange to people. Some religions are very much religions of law. Judaism, particularly Orthodox Judaism, Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, are religions that observe very carefully and faithfully divine Laws. And these three Laws of Economy, Attraction and Synthesis are said in the writings of Alice Bailey to be the three basic laws of our universe. She said that matter, the outer world, the material world, is governed by the Law of Economy. The soul, the true self, the indwelling person within the material form, is governed by the Law of Attraction, and the Law of Synthesis is said to be the law that governs pure Spirit, pure Divinity, and we’ll explain how that applies to the realm of divinity. So, you could say that the Law of Economy is very much visible in the present world that we live in. The Law of Attraction governs the impelling or compelling urge of the soul within us all, and the Law of Synthesis is that towards which the world and all of us within it are headed.
Dale: Yes, I think one of the key words in that opening thought that you mentioned was the word adaptation because that’s essentially what this Law of Economy, for example, does. It provides an impulse that enables the soul to keep adapting in the material world to the intentions of the spirit. Ultimately what it’s working out here is a process whereby the spirit within the form, the human spirit or the spiritual soul, is slowly adapting this material form to come up to the intentions of the divine Creator.
Sarah: So, evolution would be a depiction of the Law of Economy.
Dale: It’s interesting you mentioned evolution because it’s also one of the basic laws underlying what they call involution, which is the stage prior to evolution, which gets a little obscure, perhaps, but it is the basic impulse that drives this constant adaptation to ever more refined states of matter in being. This is what the soul’s function is, to keep adapting the material substance—whether it’s a human being, or human body, or whatever human beings create in the world, the forms and the institutions that we create—to make them more and more perfect.
Sarah: And it’s done under the application of the Law of Economy.
Dale: The Law of Economy is kind of the basic impulse that drives it all—right .
Robert: Well at least we scratched the surface with that one. (laughter)
Dale: That’s about it! (laughter)
Robert: Does it have anything to do with the study of economics and our national economy? I have a feeling maybe I’m totally in the dark with that one, right?
Sarah: Well, it does in a way. The Law of Economy came into action with the process of involution that Dale mentioned. It’s mentioned in the Book of Genesis, the statement that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.” God in Greek is Logos, which means word. In the sounding of the word the world came into being, so that was the beginning of the demonstration of the Law of Economy. And actually, when you go to the dictionary as people like myself do, you learn something new every time. I found out that economy is also from the Greek and it literally means household management. It’s how we manage our household, how we manage all that we have responsibility for on the physical plane. All our stuff, beginning with our body and all that goes on within it and everything that exists in the outer world that comes under our domain and control. Household management is the real meaning of economy, so the opposite polarity of that would be lavishness. And in economy and lavishness, we see the demonstration of the reference you made to the study of economics and our national economy. We either handle our financial resources with lavishness and abundance and wanting more and more and more or we handle those resources with frugality and careful application to genuine need.
Dale: Yes, it takes an obedience to this law because it has penalties if we don’t obey. Obedience to the Law of Economy develops discrimination and the true sense of values. Our time will be economized, our strength will be conserved and energy will be wisely distributed and that excessive lavishness that you mentioned will be eliminated, just by the sheer fact that we will be able to discriminate and judge when we step over the line, for example.
Sarah: I wonder if we would know it as a people; Americans so love lavishness and abundance.
Dale: Well, this is one of the laws that we’re going to have to learn, I think. It has its own penalties. It doesn’t bring happiness—all this lavish material need and the material stuff that we accumulate.
Sarah: And yet there is a school of thought within spiritual teachers that says you can have all the abundance; that you can manifest wealth and prosperity. You’ve heard those people say you can have all you want and more if you just follow certain laws. That really goes into direct conflict with the idea of the Law of Economy as careful household management of one’s material resources. It is interesting that the principle of abundance might have a more spiritual application than simply generating a lot of wealth for oneself. If one wanted to generate it for the whole of the world, that would be another matter, because it would involve the redirection and the freeing up of the flow of material energy in a way that meets real need and doesn’t allow it to be possessed by anyone. And I think we’re gradually coming to that recognition in this saying that you quite frequently hear: that we should think of money as kind of a river of energy you dip into it but you don’t own it.
Dale: I think it isn’t the material substance itself so much that is the culprit here, it’s the attachment we have to it. It says in the Bible, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Not money itself, but the love of money is the root of all evil. It’s the attachment aspect to this substance that is really holding us down in kind of a prison.
Sarah: There’s another aspect to the Law of Economy, though, that doesn’t directly have to do with money, and that is economy of effort and of movement, economy of energy. When you pour too much energy into something, you’re going against the grain, in a sense; you’re trying to force something in a way that isn’t natural. Then you’re breaking the Law of Economy in just as real a sense as when you try to hoard too much financial resources. An example of a people that probably had a very good understanding of the Law of Economy would be the American Indians, who managed their environmental resources in such a way that they used up everything that they took. For example, if they hunted animals, they used all of the animal that they killed—every part of it. They didn’t just use a portion of the animal that was most tasty to eat and then dispose of the rest wastefully. They are, I think, a good example of a people that understood that all material substance has value and you can’t waste it. They seem to understand instinctively or intuitively that if you waste, you then lose the right to possess more in the future, and maybe that’s something we can learn from them.
Dale: Yes, that’s very true, I think. And there’s also the aspect that it’s not only what materialism is doing to the human being, but it’s what we as human beings, as human souls in this world, are doing to this material substance. Because it has definite effect upon the vibratory rate by which the very atoms of substance vibrate, and as we use it more productively and keep refining and refining the substance we work with, then this also increases the rate of vibration for the atoms of substance. So, it works both ways.
Sarah: That brings up something I hadn’t thought about in a long time, but there’s a scientist at the University of Kansas, I think, who has been experimenting for decades with using the natural grasses of the prairie to provide sufficient crops for farming, and it’s fascinating what he’s learned. Rather than trying to turn the soil into a producer of grains and grasses that aren’t natural to that environment and that would require a lot of fertilizer, a lot of energy, a lot of cultivation, he’s been experimenting with what the prairie would naturally produce on its own, left to its own natural devices and what was there before the European settlers came along and eliminated it all. The prairie, in its original state, had a lot of food value that sustained not only animals, but human beings, and so he’s trying to return the prairie to its natural source. He’s following the Law of Economy because he’s using the line of least resistance.
Dale: That’s the whole objective behind the Law of Economy, to produce that line of least resistance and he’s helping to adapt and readapt the prairie to its perfect state.
Robert: Sarah, you reminded me of something that I just heard a minister say the other day and he was speaking about an interpretation he had of something Christ said and it was very parallel to what you were saying before. The minister was saying that in Christ’s discussion advising a young man that to be on a spiritual path, he had to let go of material wealth, Christ was only speaking to that particular individual, he wasn’t really downing wealth at all. He was looking at that particular man’s viewpoint of wealth and how he dealt with his wealth. So that was an interesting comment and you more or less paralleled that. How does the Law of Synthesis influence our lives? Is there any relation between this law and scientists’ ability to synthesize, say, a new drug?
Sarah: Yes, synthesis, I suppose, could be defined as combining the various component elements into a single more complex, yet more unified organism or entity. It’s the combining of parts into a new whole that is at the same time more integrated and unified and yet more complex. This happens in the laboratory with scientists and chemists who create drugs. It happens in the world laboratory and it’s happening right now. We can look at the combining of elements into single units just in the past century. One tremendous example was the forming of the United Nations. That’s an example of synthesis, where at present—I don’t know—there must be over one hundred and sixty nations that are members of this world organization. Not as component parts, but as members of the United Nations itself. In other words, it isn’t a case where each country promotes only its own interests—or it shouldn’t be a case where each country promotes only its own interests—within the global forum that the UN provides, but rather that all of the nations together that make up the UN produce a unified approach to solving world problems. It’s by no means perfect, but that’s the ideal which the UN is trying to express. Another example is the European Union that has formed in recent years where more and more people within Europe think not so much of themselves being French or Danish or Italian, but as being European, identifying with a larger, unified whole.
Dale: And the same thing happened with our own country in the United States, too. We went through a synthetic process where we moved from an old idea of imperialism to a newer ideal of constitutional democracy and creating out of a group of very distinct states one unified country. So, there again it’s an expression of this Law of Synthesis by making these divergent parts into a greater whole and what comes out is greater than the sum of the parts.
Sarah: Again, using your terms of involution and evolution: involution, which brings spirit down into matter, follows a path that naturally tends toward diversity. And we can look at the outer world and see all of the diverse material forms and marvel at the tremendous variety of divinity as it expresses in the outer world. Just looking at humanity itself, there’s such a diversity to human beings in their outer forms in terms of races, religions, culture and so on. But the evolutionary tendency, the return of matter to spirit, is the return to unity, to synthesis. And in the writings of Alice Bailey, it says that the Law of Synthesis is the tendency to concentrate at a centre or to merge, and that’s why the examples of the founding of the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, demonstrate that law: the forming of convergence of separated parts in a new and greater and more powerful, more complex whole. Well, that is what happens with the human being on the spiritual path. He or she leaves behind the diversity of the unique, separated personality with all of its various qualities and tendencies and experiences, and instead returns toward a unification with divinity. The most cliched way of expressing that is the sense within people when they get ready to die that they are going home to God. They have a sense that they are returning to their Source, to the One, from which they came and to which they belong.
Dale: Yes, it’s the very presence of these laws that gives us that sense of immortality and assures us that if we allow it that we will return to our Source and the Law of Synthesis is what provides that drawing power to pull us back. Also, as is said in the writings of Alice Bailey, it’s the underlying factor in all the world’s religions. It’s the instinct to unify and to seek a closer union with God. So yes, it’s very much present in the world all the time, whether we realize it or not.
Sarah: And I think we can foster this tendency to synthesis in our own consciousness by developing an attitude of inclusiveness. In other words, using it towards one’s fellow human beings, thinking of the common ground that one shares with the people on the same subway car that you are on. Look around at all the diversity of people and imagine that all of you share the same creator and the same goal. Whether you will reach it now or later depends on each individual, but we are all headed in the same direction. So, there’s an inclusiveness that fosters synthesis.
Robert: Does the Law of Attraction also mean that what we think about most strongly is what we attract to us?
Sarah: Well, I suppose because it’s said that “like attracts like.” That which we are drawn to, whether it’s a person, a place or a thing, we eventually possess and in the possessing of that we learn its value.
Robert: Okay, thank you. And do you have any closing thoughts about spiritual laws?
Sarah: Well, just to reassert that laws govern the evolution of the human being, that these Laws of Synthesis, Economy and Attraction have to do with the Plan of God in a deeply mysterious way that we can’t really grasp.
Dale: Yes, and you mentioned the Plan; these three laws are embodied or they actually underlie the words of the Great Invocation. We have the Law of Economy in “from the point of light within the mind of God,” expressing the need for light in the world. The Law of Attraction is expressed in the second verse, the love aspect. And the third, “let light and love and power restore the Plan on Earth,” the need for power to bring about this synthetic action. These are all expressed in the Great Invocation, and that’s one of the values we have.
Sarah: We could also add for our listeners that everything on the physical plane is governed by the Law of Economy, the wisest expenditure of energy and effort, and when we evade this law, we see disease, fatigue and wasted, fruitless efforts. We can begin to see its demonstration right within our own lives.
Robert: That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You’ve been listening to “Inner Sight.” Now we would like to close with a world prayer called the Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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